Almost immediately after taking office, District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong has been saddled with a herculean task.
After multiple power outages in his district and neighboring districts, and a seemingly facile response from the utility monolith Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Wong has to hold the firm accountable for what appears to be the latest result of a culture of deferred maintenance and negligence.
“We’ve had six outages in the Sunset District just this month. That’s six days out of my first 30 days in office. It’s really ridiculous,” Wong told the Voice and listeners during a Sunday Brunch Space held on X.com this past weekend. “Many of our small businesses lost so much in revenue.”
And then more outages happened.
“We had a resident who was on a ventilator, and he had to go to the hospital. It was that bad,” Wong added. “We had a Chinese barbecue spot where they had 80 chickens hanging and 40 pigs hanging. They threw them all away during the winter solstice for the Asian community, and as Christmas was approaching. It was a big, big disappointment for folks.”
Wong is calling for a public hearing before the Board of Supervisors on the outages at Tuesday’s meeting, the first of 2026. He wants the utility giant to answer at least three big questions: how will they prevent future outages, what about the possibility of more serious incidents like wildfires, and what will they do to remedy neighborhood business losses more meaningfully?
A 2012 state audit found that PG&E raided a safety operations fund and diverted $100 million to executive pay and bonuses.
“There are businesses that have already lost tens of thousands of dollars. For them, a $2,500 bill credit isn’t going to cut it,” he said. “As a National Guard officer, I was deployed to wildfires in Paradise and elsewhere, and I’ve seen the devastation that can occur. I don’t want anything like that to be happening in my neighborhood or hometown. So if PG&E can’t handle an outage like this, how can I trust them for a major disaster?”
All good questions, especially given PG&E’s problematic recent history with outages and disasters. The utility has developed a reputation for “deferred maintenance,” including long repair backlogs, systemic problems with maintaining its oldest power lines, and reports suggesting that the utility prioritized shareholder dividends over repairs.
Regulators have linked the issue to horrific outcomes such as the 2018 Camp Fire and the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion. In 2012, a state audit found that the utility raided a safety operations fund and diverted $100 million to executive pay and bonuses.
Some sources close to the company have told The Voice that diverting funds in this way has been routine for decades. Others related that a general reluctance at the California Public Utilities Commission to approve utility service rate increases, in turn, made the utility reluctant to ask for approval for funds for improvements.
One major improvement that increases the safety and reliability of utility lines is to install them underground. The problem is that it’s expensive, and initial installation and maintenance have been inconvenient for neighborhoods in the past. New “trenchless” technologies, such as microtunnel boring machines, are changing that.
But can you change what appears to be a culture of negligence at PG&E? And if not, what’s the alternative?
Wong is also sending a letter to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and the city controller, asking for options for better oversight of utility service, as well as “an assessment of practical, fiscal, and operational considerations to better maintain a power grid in the public interest.”
That may give more momentum to moving San Francisco toward full ownership of the city’s power grid, which PG&E has resisted. The SFPUC currently provides 75 percent of the city’s electricity through two programs, CleanPowerSF and Hetch Hetchy Power. On Dec. 22, state Senator Scott Wiener announced that he would introduce legislation in the new year that would “let San Francisco break up with PG&E after this weekend’s fiasco.”
On Sunday, Wong said he would weigh the pros and cons of full public ownership of the electric power system, a policy goal the city has struggled with for decades, “based on the practicalities of the situation and the operational and fiscal considerations.”